Book Image

Professional Azure SQL Database Administration - Second Edition

By : Ahmad Osama
Book Image

Professional Azure SQL Database Administration - Second Edition

By: Ahmad Osama

Overview of this book

Despite being the cloud version of SQL Server, Azure SQL Database differs in key ways when it comes to management, maintenance, and administration. This book shows you how to administer Azure SQL Database to fully benefit from its wide range of features and functionalities. Professional Azure SQL Database Administration begins by covering the architecture and explaining the difference between Azure SQL Database and the on-premise SQL Server to help you get comfortable with Azure SQL Database. You’ll perform common tasks such as migrating, backing up and restoring a SQL Server database to an Azure database. As you progress, you’ll understand how you can reduce costs, and manage and scale multiple SQL databases using elastic pools. You’ll also implement a disaster recovery solution using standard and active geo-replication. Whether it is learning different techniques to monitor and tune an Azure SQL Database or improving performance using in-memory technology, this book will enable you to make the most out of Azure SQL database features and functionality for data management solutions. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with key aspects of an Azure SQL Database instance, such as migration, backup restorations, performance optimization, high availability, and disaster recovery.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

DTU Pricing Models

Database Transaction Units

The amount of resources (CPUs, I/O, and RAM) to be assigned to an Azure SQL Database in a particular service tier is calculated in Database Transaction Units (DTUs).

DTUs guarantee that an Azure SQL Database will always have a certain amount of resources and a certain level of performance (offered under a particular DTU model) at any given point of time, independent of other SQL databases on the same Azure SQL server or across Microsoft Azure.

The ratio for the aforementioned resources was calculated by Microsoft by running an Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) benchmark.

The DTU amount signifies how powerful an Azure SQL Database is. For example, if a workload of, say, 5 queries takes 80 seconds on the Basic tier with 5 DTUs, then it'll take around 4 seconds on the Standard S3 tier with 100 DTUs.

There are four pricing tiers available in the DTU-based pricing model:

Note

The DTU is the measure of Azure SQL Database performance. This is discussed...